Mme. Blowhard makes a bowl

A learning experience

Like most baby boomers, I have spent years nurturing my own opinions.  The arrows in my bulging quiver of rants have been so frequently shot off that I am bored to hear myself talk.  In addition to the blah-blah-blah factor,  my well-practiced shower of certainty on many subjects is accompanied nowadays by the honest but painful realization that it sure is hard to practice what you preach.  Hello, Herschel Walker.

Follow me, in my post-professional promenade, to pottery class, where the challenges of aesthetic hurdles have been overshadowed by the reality: I am a hypocrite. 

On the first day of ceramics class at City College, I was, as usual, early.  The teacher was getting the studio ready, placing a few hand-made ceramic birds in the center of a table that was going to be his home base.  He said hello, and then, in a friendly and inquisitive way, “What made you take this class?”  “Well,” I said, with not a second’s hesitation, “I like to do things with my hands.”   I was thinking of the pleasure I have gotten out of cooking, baking, painting, playing piano, knitting, all activities for which my hands have stepped up to the plate.  “So I had a feeling I might like this,” I said, with a smile I hoped would indicate I wasn’t overly sure of myself, but I was optimistic.  

When everyone else arrived, he asked for a show of hands, and I learned that most other people in the class were beginners, too, although a few had acquired ceramics skills in previous classes. I was certainly the oldest person there,  which I was trying not to notice. My only experience had been building clay animals with one grandson.  But having watched several videos of artisans  seemingly effortlessly  molding lumps of clay into graceful forms that have been created over centuries of tradition,  I was sure that I would like it.  I was taken especially when the teacher talked about how the state of mind of the maker  is transferred through the hands to that which the maker is creating.

My state of mind was A-OK, I thought.  With my professional life behind me, no more deadlines to meet, no more meetings to attend, no more performance evaluations, I felt nothing but pleasure at the thought of serenely sitting at the wheel, caressing the clay with my fingertips as I coaxed it into gently rounded shapes.  

We started by making bird whistles, small ocarina-like objects that would emit a sound if blown.  The examples that had been placed on the table were only a starting point for our enthusiastic class of bird-builders.  Students created birds that were both lifelike and whimsical, birds that cooed and whistled, and seemed to be cocking their heads in delight after being hatched by the potters’  deft hands.

 My first bird was warty, lumpy, rough, its surface looking as though the poor guy had mange, a disease I’d always thought was limited to canines. In keeping with Darwinian ideas of evolution and  survival, the appearance of my first bird seemed to be a harbinger of the extinction of all avian life on the planet. 

 My teacher said he thought my bird had charm. I tried to think of its irregularities as water off a duck’s back.  The  hidden surprise – only obvious if you picked the thing up – was its weight.  This would have been a definite asset if I were intent on making decorative stones that  Virginia Wolff wannabes could stuff into their pockets for dips in the river. 

But that’ remark – ha ha –  is just what I am wont to do: Out of failure, make a joke. Then you’ll be laughing at yourself before anyone else can laugh at you.   I was not, I said to myself, going to abandon the fine-feathered challenge.  I’d stick with it.   In a few weeks, I went on to create  a flock, a total of seven birds.  The last, hatched at home out of a lump of clay I’d  carried  away from campus  and home for remedial whistle-making, made a sound.  

By that time, when I proclaimed myself done with birds, everyone else was on to making platters.  My success at that was on a par with my success with the bird.  Other students turned out serving dishes with elegant designs glazed and carved onto their surfaces. The surface of mine was indented by the face of a potato masher I’d brought from home in hopes of creating a pattern.  I’d been forced to shore up sections on its underside where I’d pressed the pattern too deeply.  What I’d hoped would be a deep blue surface came out mottled green., 

It didn’t matter, I told my friends.  After working for years at a job where I had – like most of us – to pretend I knew what I was doing,  it was kind of a relief to start knowing nothing and to move on from there. No one expected me to be successful, I wasn’t hoping to have a museum exhibition and my cupboards were already crowded with tureens and gravy boats  for Thanksgiving dinner.  The real success of my endeavors was to spend my time doing something pleasurable, and to learn something.. 

From time to time, as class continued, I thought of that first day, when with great self-confidence, I’d told the teacher that I liked to work with my hands.  Sometimes in the middle of the term, he’d be watching while my thumb plowed through the side of a bowl like a knife taking a schmear out of a room-temperature stick of butter.  It turned out that I, who had been reasonably sure about the competence of my hands,  could use my paws every bit as well as I might have been able to use my feet if someone had asked me to tapdance.  That is, I couldn’t do it at all.

Which brings me to one of my major rants, delivered before I ever set foot in ceramics class:  Upon noticing that their children enjoy doing one or another activity (running around, putting on shows, hurling themselves against a wall), it was my observation that over-diligent parents signed their kids up for formal classes, where they got instruction, invested in equipment and strove to achieve imposed standards. Too often, I’d said too often, this robbed the kid of the pleasure of doing something spontaneously.  Even worse, it robbed the kid of the pleasure of doing something at a primitive level.  What we all need to do, I say, and had said and said, is to learn how to enjoy doing things we’re not particularly good at.   

As I   puttered around with my platter – eventually two platters, hoping fruitlessly that  the second would be better than the first –  my always-encouraging  teacher admired the organic quality of my output. After years of professional pottery-making, he was sad, he said, that he had lost the rough-hewn lopsided touch that came so naturally to me.   I smiled in gratitude for the compliment, thinking it was is something like Shakespeare complaining that after writing so many plays, he had lost the ability to make a grocery list.  

When it was time to sit down at the wheel, I could choose whether I wanted to use  a kick- or electric wheel.   Keeping in mind that “organic” quality, I opted for the former.  But the only thing that I was able to kick start was my ineptitude.   I’d kick furiously for a minute, and then sigh as the heavy thing slowed then stopped after two more rotations,  like a carousel grinding to a halt when the calliope runs out of steam.     No worry, no blame, I moved to the electric wheel.

On either side of me, fellow students were whipping out cups and bowls, jugs and even ikebana vases, the last made with precision and elegance by an experienced student. When I looked at what everyone else was doing, I marveled at their skill and pretended I didn’t remember that most of these ceramic whiz kids had identified themselves as beginners on that first day:  Have you ever done this before, I asked?   But their answers hadn’t changed;  only a few had experience.  

At the same time, I could hear my own voice, rattling around in a boring and endless  lecture to myself.  What’s the use of being competitive?  It doesn’t matter; you are not being judged.   Just enjoy the process.  Remember what the teacher said during the first class:  that your state of mind – no, even more important, your state of soul – will be reflected in your work.

 The first time we watched our teacher make a bowl, he told us that it could be done in 10 minutes.  We stood around his wheel while his hands slid over the clay, beckoning and pushing and making it impossible for this raw material to turn down his invitation to transform itself into bowl-hood.

When I was beyond birds, beyond plates, I decided one afternoon that I wasn’t going to  leave not-well-enough alone.  I would do nothing else in class that day but  sit at the wheel and try to make one decent bowl. I must have worked on 10 bowls, each one leaning or collapsing or tearing or laughing in my face in some other way.  By the end of the three-hour class, I was in a sweat, scraping  off the bat (the round slab that fits on top of the wheel and serves as the working surface for the pot) a succession of failed bowls, punching the defenseless clay into a ball, and hurling it down on the again, with all my strength.  Would this bowl be a reflection of my mood?   

The lovely woman who usually sat next to me and was turning out bowls and cups as though she were the Pottery Barn, offered advice.  My teacher came by for a patient and heartfelt one-on-one, after which I felt guilty that I was using so much of his attention.  When I said that aloud, another student kindly dropped by to reassure me that she’d done the same thing last semester.  As the class elder, I wasn’t shy about lapping up the attention. It wasn’t scornful pity, it was friendly pity, and if my place in the class was like my place on Muni (this space reserved for seniors and the infirm), I guess I could accept that.

What I’m having trouble with is accepting all those  times I was so sure of what everyone else should do.   When a close family member facing physical challenges dropped out of therapy because it was hard, I found the words to be understanding,  but I was sure I would never  be like that. “She’s almost always been successful,” I said when explaining why she had abandoned the challenge.  “She doesn’t know how to cope with something that’s hard.”

That – the potting and the coping – isn’t easy for me, either. I fall asleep thinking of how I ought to bend my fingers against the insides of my bowls, determined to continue with my ceramics exploration.  But perhaps, after all those years of thinking that I know what everyone else should do, the biggest lesson isn’t in creating the perfect bowl. I promise, I’m going to try to shut the hell up.